About Me

Jonathan Payne is a freelance artist residing in Santa Clarita, California. His sculptures and paintings focus primarily on creature and character design . He has studied under Jordu Schell (Men In Black, Edward Scissorhands, Avatar), concept sculptor Simon Lee and fine art sculptor John Brown. He prefers to sculpt in oil, polymer and WED clays. Recently he has become consumed with creating an original line of tumorous balls of flesh known as the Fleshlettes. In addition to his macabre "babies" he also enjoys composing fine art sculptures depicting both wildlife and the human form. Jonathan is available for hire as a freelance artist and for individual commissions.

Tuesday, May 03, 2011

updated: Now with cracks in the face

So I went back and redid the whole body below the neck on my pugnacious gladiator thanks to some great insight from my friend Tyler Jacobson. The downside is that when I finally cooked him he got some gnarly cracks in the bridge of the nose. I think the ones under the left eye (his left) are happy accidents that look like scars. The bridge of the nose one? Not so much. Anyone have any suggestions? I'm leaning towards either stuffing some more clay in there and re-baking or tinting some epoxy sculpt grey and filling it in to look like scar.

My fear with the super sculpy is while it will look the best, it could expand in there and push the face open creating a massive sculpture ruining crack. Any experience with this? Ideas, suggestions welcome.

4 comments:

Hey there! Do NOT panic! All you need is to thin out the polymer clay with a liquid polymer. FIMO makes one and I know sculpy does too. You can use baby oil or mineral oil but use it very sparingly. If you thin the clay out too much with a non hardening oil the polymer hardeners will not work and the clay may become sticky after time. I have used liquid FIMO for thinning out clay to fill firing cracks many times. Sometimes it takes a couple coats of clay to fill the crack with short firings in between to set it.Your Stuff is fabulous by the way! Thanks for showing us. Good luck with Pugnacious.

Jane - Thank you very much for your kind words! You should definitely try it out! Super sculpey and sculpey III an sculpey firm are all great mediums that can be mixed and matched. You'll find that they are a bit softer and less self-reinforcing than oil clay but they also lend themselves very well to human skin textures and are much easier to finish with alcohol than most clays are with stronger and more toxic solvents. Let me know if you ever have any questions.